19 I 2023

yes, this. taking photos of the blackboard and writing down only the "sketch" of the lecture usually does the trick for me: I have all the details I need but I'm able to actually listen

a thing that i didn’t understand as a student, that many of my students don’t understand, and that i still sometimes struggle to put into practice: taking the most detailed notes is not always the best way to learn the material. trying to write down every single thing a teacher (or other person who is presenting auditory information to you) says is not only slow but it also can easily stop you from being mentally present during the lesson, internalizing the main ideas and how everything fits together, which is what will actually help you learn the material.

I finally tried mindmaps to keep track of the 200 kinds of morphisms and another 100 kinds of sheaves (that one is work in progress)

I kinda like the result and I hope to finally use my notes in the future

some more animation: how secant-teenager becomes tangent-adult

also! it illustrates a well-known inequality of a differentiable convex function and its tangents & the monotony of slopes

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

I hate it when I am blessed with a new tumblr feature without my consent

Balance

What's the beef between engineers and physicists and even mathematicians.

Why physicists mock mathematicians: Because playing 51 dimensional chess against your own brain seems silly to us when there’s a whole cosmos to explore.

Why mathematicians mock physicists: The universe can only be understood because some nerd spent the time playing 51 dimensional chess and in the process they created some useful stuff for the physicists to steal and abuse the hell out of.

Why everyone mocks the engineers: π=e=3 is an abomination before God and those pencil pushing dorks make more money than us so we feel the need to vindicate our $75000 student debt.

Iconic Things My Coding Professors Have Said (and it’s only day one)

“that sounds very hacky, but smart”

“i’m not sure where i’m going with this… its quite similiar to my life”

*Entire class and prof spends fifteen minutes trying to solve a problem before eventually giving up* “great work guys, that was some good debugging”

“is this a super big issue?” *longggg dramatic sigh* “… yes”.

Professor 1: “it’s still not working? um… okay, maybe you should… turn off your wifi and turn it back on again?“   Professor 2: "40 years of experience in networking and computing at its finest”

“whenever i’m doing my taxes, i never use the calculator app on my phone, i always just open up a notebook and use python and i think thats very brave of me”

“your life quality with improve when you use python 3 instead of python 2. your skin will improve and you’ll even sleep better”

“so this compiler doesn’t recognise cases, so if you’re really perverse, you could do Apple, aPple, apPle, appLe, applE, but if you do that then i’m going to kick you out”

“so, let’s give an example: "True = False”. Asides from causing the end of the world, much like dividing by 0, this will also cause an error”

“if you want to see my cat, i’ll show her. if you DON’T want to see my cat, too bad, cause I’m going to show you her anyway”

“today we will use three keywords: `if`, `else`, and their weird cousin `elif`.”

“if you want to type something else, like… uh, goodbye world? maybe? is that too dark? i think its too dark, so lets save that for later on in the year… by the way, have you been told about your exams yet?”

Professor : “is everything clear so far? shall i go faster?”   Literally EVERYONE: “no! slower!“   Professor: "Slower?! you can go slow when you’re dead, you won’t need python then!”

“you can’t use functions as your variable names. for example, you can’t call this number "if”. i mean i don’t know why you’d use that as your variable name to begin with, but i’m not here to question your life, i’m here to teach you python”

“it’s probably not the most efficient but its just what came out of me so we’re running with it”

Part 1 | Part 2

“Netflix and chill?”

No, PDF and cry

today I learned that for a surface with boundary, which I believe we can say a straw is, the genus is equal to that of a 2-manifold obtained from attaching disks to the boundary. hence the straw has genus equal to that of a 2-sphere, which is 0, therefore a straw has 0 holes

also a straw is not homotopic to a torus I think, but rather to S¹, as it's a product of S¹ and a closed interval, which is contractible. a torus has the fundamental group S¹×S¹, thus they cannot be homotopy equivalent. buuut that requires the straw to be infinitely thin so maybe I'm too idealistic for this claim to hold and it is in fact equivalent to a torus

lmao I love math but I can't stop laughing at the fact that it took me two years of university to be able to have this discussion

I’m really into internet discourse but only pointless and stupid internet discourse like how many holes there are in a straw (it’s 2)